Ask any senior researcher what they are proudest of, and a striking number will name the people they trained rather than the papers they wrote. Yet mentorship and training are almost entirely invisible in the formal research record. There is no DOI for supervising a doctoral researcher to completion, no citation count for the postdoc you helped launch, no structured field anywhere that records the years of pastoral and intellectual labour that hold a research group together. This is the archetypal hidden labour of research, and a cluster of recent developments is beginning to make it countable. This article surveys them, drawing on the mentorship and career-stages domain.
Why the gap exists
The formal record evolved to capture outputs — articles, books, patents, datasets — because outputs are discrete, attributable, and citable. Mentorship is none of those things. It is continuous, diffuse, and its effects show up years later in someone else’s career. The traditional CV gestures at it (“supervised 12 PhD students”) but in a form that is unverifiable, uncomparable, and easy to inflate. The result is a systematic under-recognition of exactly the work that sustains research culture, and a corresponding incentive to neglect it in favour of countable outputs.
Narrative CVs: making space for the contribution
The most consequential development is the shift toward narrative CVs. The UK Research and Innovation funder, UKRI, made its Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) format standard across all its funding from January 2024; the Royal Society’s Résumé for Researchers preceded it, and Wellcome and others run comparable formats. These replace the enumerated publication list with a structured narrative organised around contribution types — and, crucially, they explicitly ask researchers to describe their contributions to people and to the research community, not only to knowledge.
The R4RI structure asks for contributions across several modules, one of which is explicitly about the development of individuals — mentoring, supervision, team-building, and support for others’ careers. For the first time in a mainstream funding format, “I mentored three early-career researchers into independent positions” is not a throwaway line at the bottom of a CV but a first-class, evaluated contribution. The narrative form is what makes this possible: mentorship resists enumeration, but it can be described, and a good narrative description is assessable by a panel in a way that a raw number never was.
Career-stage vocabulary: the precondition for fair comparison
Recognising mentorship fairly requires knowing who is being mentored and where they are in their career — which requires a shared career-stage vocabulary. The terms look mundane but their absence causes real unfairness. A doctoral researcher, a postdoctoral researcher, an early-career researcher, a mid-career researcher, an established researcher — these are not interchangeable, and the expectations attached to each differ. Funder definitions of “early-career” vary widely, which means a researcher can be eligible for an ECR scheme in one country and not in another for no principled reason.
Just as important are the terms for career breaks — parental, caring, illness, military service — and for part-time and fractional working. These exist in the vocabulary for a specific reason: responsible-assessment regimes expect evaluators to make career-stage adjustments, judging a researcher’s track record relative to the time and circumstances they actually had. A researcher who took two years of parental leave and works at 0.6 FTE should not be assessed as though they had a continuous full-time career. None of that is possible without a controlled vocabulary that lets the relevant facts be recorded and read consistently. Career-stage terms are, in this sense, equity infrastructure.
Recording the mentorship relationship itself
Beyond the CV, there is the question of recording the mentorship relationship as structured data. The vocabulary distinguishes a primary mentor from a secondary mentor, a thesis supervisor from a postdoc mentor, and records events such as mentee completion — a mentorship reaching a successful conclusion, a degree awarded, a postdoc transitioned to their next position. Where these are captured as structured records, with the people involved identified by ORCID iD, a mentorship history becomes something a researcher can carry with them, claim on a narrative CV, and have verified — rather than an unverifiable assertion.
CRediT extensions and the limits of the current taxonomy
How does CRediT handle this? Only partially, and that is a recognised gap. CRediT’s Supervision role covers “oversight and leadership responsibility… including mentorship external to the core team,” which captures mentorship that shapes a specific output. But CRediT applies to outputs, and most mentorship is not attached to a single paper. The doctoral supervision that shaped a researcher over four years is not well described by a Supervision tag on one of their papers.
This is one of the motivations behind the active work on CRediT extensions and adjacent contribution vocabularies — roles for mentors, technical staff, and other acknowledged contributors whose work the 14-role taxonomy does not capture. The honest position is that mentorship is better served by the narrative CV and by structured relationship records than by stretching the output-level CRediT statement to cover it. CRediT credits contribution to a work; mentorship is contribution to a person, and the field is still building the vocabulary for the latter. Initiatives such as the Hidden REF have done much to make the case that this labour should be visible at all.
What to do now
For researchers: use the mentorship and career-development modules of narrative CV formats fully — describe the people you have developed, not just the papers you have produced. For institutions and funders: adopt a consistent career-stage vocabulary, record career breaks and fractional working, and make genuine career-stage adjustments in assessment. For vocabulary work: prioritise the structured representation of the mentorship relationship and the CRediT extensions for acknowledged contributors. The labour that builds the next generation of researchers should be visible in the record that generation inherits.
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